


Love & Trust

by worstcommander



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, Horizon (Mass Effect), Mass Effect Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-23 01:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/920434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worstcommander/pseuds/worstcommander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minifill for the Mass Effect Kink Meme</p>
<p>Jane Shepard loved many. She trusted one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love & Trust

**Author's Note:**

> (original: http://masseffectkink.livejournal.com/6870.html?thread=31954646#t31954646)
> 
> "After Horizon, Shepard is a bit angry, and a bit hurt. But most of all? She's fucking proud of Kaidan for sticking to his beliefs. Because her resurrection is unbelievable. Cerberus is a terrorist organization. And Shepard herself? Is Alliance to the core. There's no way she could respect someone who threw away his oath to the Alliance on the say-so of an old lover, even if that lover is her."

Jane Shepard loved many people.

Some might say it a weakness. Perhaps it was. One can only be as they are, however, and Jane Shepard was a woman who loved.

"Disordered attachment," the Alliance therapist had called it. Her instinctive drive to cherish, to cling, to hold fast. It wasn't proper, wasn't normal, he'd argued, pushing the anachronistic wire frames back up his nose. It was her past, those dark and grasping fingers urging her on, making her fall too hard and too fast and too soon and too completely. 

She'd loved that therapist. 

She loved the Normandy, metal bones and synthetic sinews. She loved Joker from the moment he refused to salute properly, Wrex in all his glory, Garrus from the first irritated twitch of a mandible. She loved Ashley and her sisters, even though she'd only ever known them from cheerful and regular rounds of vidmail. She loved Liara, if not quite in the way it was returned, and as she hugged Tali close she understood the silent, secret message shuddered from one chest into another. 

Love. Jane Shepard loved many. 

She trusted one. 

That was the true lesson of her childhood. Love freely, but accept that everyone is out for themselves. If you don't trust them it doesn't hurt. 

She trusted Kaidan Alenko, and he'd accepted it without even understanding what it meant. She'd known, even as she carried him to the Normandy that day on Virmire, that he would have stayed, done his duty, died a hero. He could improvise, challenge her, and she would listen because she knew that he could no more betray her than she could him. 

He'd never know. The night before Ilos wasn't nearly the first time she'd taken a man to bed, but it was the first time she'd let one stay. 

As he walked away on Horizon, her heart broke. It wasn't quick or clean, like the graze on her shoulder. It shattered in the shuttle and ground like glass shards in the airlock. It bled on the deck of her beloved Normandy, all the way to her empty bed. 

Love raged and Trust consoled. Faced with the honeyed apple, he had refused. 

And stars help her, she loved him for it. Loved the sharp mind that wouldn't rest on easy answers, the stick up his ass that kept him from abandoning his post for her side. Loved the hesitant shade of his honest apology (and oh how Trust had settled smugly at that, in Love's sullen shadow.) 

As he lowered his weapon before her on the Citadel, something swelled in her chest, stronger than love ever had.

Her trust had not been misplaced.


End file.
